Just WHO or WHAT do you make your Higher Power?

Shelley's Corner: A Series on Emotional Trauma, Addiction, and Healing

Dr. Shelley Uram is a Harvard trained, triple board-certified psychiatrist and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. As a Meadows' Senior Fellow, Dr. Uram conducts patient lectures and provides ongoing training and consultation to the treatment staff at The Meadows.

Welcome Back To Shelley's Corner

Many of you readers are, or have been involved with 12-Step programs. One of the most important foundations of the 12-Step way of life is the recognition of a Higher Power and aligning one’s life with it. This can prove to be enormously helpful in our lives taking on a new and far healthier/happier direction.

Something that can be very useful in the process of turning our will and lives over to the care of our Higher Power, is identifying to whom and what we are currently turning over our power.

The more obvious ones would be the alcohol and drugs upon which we have become dependent, but there is a much broader array of people, values, ideas, habits, etc. that many of us make our Higher Power. These can be subtle.

For example, how many of us hold getting or keeping the approval of certain people as very, very important to us? It could be a relative or a friend. How about having a certain appearance? How about ideas on which you place extreme importance? Take a careful look at the regard you give these things. If you are really honest with yourself, you might find that you actually hold many people, ideas, habits, etc. as a Higher Power. Do you do it consciously? Not usually.

Does this mean you have to throw out of your life these people, values, ideas, habits, etc? No! What is important is to recognize what you are doing, and then if you choose, take back your power.

Once you become aware of “plugging into” other things as your Higher Power, that’s the time to question and possibly challenge it. You then have even more of you available for your true Higher Power.